An open letter to The Lawyer

So we agree, we're better as Friends. And not in the 'I hope that we can still be friends' way, but sincerely. I'm glad we worked this out sooner than later because not having you around to goof off with would suck, but dating you was wrecking me and I know I was driving you crazy too.

But do you really have to bring the other girl to the New Year's party being held in my fucking apartment? Because I have nowhere else to go. I don't know people in Boston, I don't have a list of other places I could be. And while I know it's tricky because you've been seeing her for so long (years, really), and while I'm aware that my flatmate is your best friend, and while I'm sure it would have been an awkward conversation to have with the girl who assumed she was invited when she heard about it - and I'm not sure what, if anything, she knows about me - it's still going to be a fuckload ickier for me to have her inescapably there for five hours. I truly don't have anything against her - she's perfectly nice and must have the patience of a saint to have been trying to hold onto you for as long as she has - but for god's sake, cut me a little slack. Please. It's a small group of people (10-15, of whom I'll know four, and one of them is you) in a small apartment. What am I supposed to do if it gets rough? Sit in my room and read a book? I won't pretend that I don't still have a few unresolved feelings for you, and though those will pass quickly (they mostly already have), watching that this soon this close-up for this long is not going to be easy, and not only will I not be able to step out of it, I won't even be able to talk to any of the people there about it, even the few I know, because they're all your friends. Not mine.

You know you fucked up. You told me so. But you refuse to acknowledge that there's any other option for you apart from 'well, we just won't come', and you know full well that a) that's not an option because as previously noted, my flatmate = your bestie and you know everyone that will be there, whereas I know none of them, and you would be missed; and b) ... god, just stop being so stupid, would you please? Ugh.

So yes, this New Year's Eve will be different from the last. Last year I was surrounded by summer and old friends and excitement and promise. This year I'll be surrounded by cold and wet and strangers and an awkward situation. But you watch: I'll smile and be charming and laugh a lot, because I'm very good at that; and I'll medicate heavily and drink substantially and hope that I pass out before the ball drops and I have to see you kiss the new year in with the other girl. Because I'm happy to be your friend, but in that moment I'll still be a little sad I'm not more.

XOXO

Home Sweet Home

So yes. I've moved. Hey Dorchester, how you been?

I'm in a relatively good part of one of Boston's worst neighbourhoods - like, murder-capital-of-the-city worst - but because my house is on the main street it still looks a bit rough. Like, you know how on Enmore Road it's decent and fine but all the best houses are a block or two back and the main street looks rougher than the rest of the area? It's like that, but then drop Enmore Road and the surrounding nice houses into one of the better bits of, I don't know, Cabramatta. The odd gunshot in the night is the price you pay for low rent.

That having been said, my apartment is lovely. It's in a block of ground-floor shops with flats above, all of which were razed and fully renovated 4-5 years ago when the area was just starting to improve a bit. Flattie Karen and her ex-roommate were the first people to move into the flat after it was finished, and Karen's a neat-freak so it's still in great nick. And while it's a dodgy area generally, you definitely get the feeling in my part that it's coming back: there are lots of new businesses, people are friendly and chatty, that sort of thing. My street - Dorchester Ave, locally known as Dot Ave - is a main street and runs for miles in either direction, and it's funny to see how the gentrification is happening along it. You'll have two blocks that look pretty good, with awesome-looking bars and cafes and stuff, then suddenly you're in Fallujah. And then just as suddenly, it's fine again.

Gentrification in Boston is a constant, messy process: our population density is the 3rd highest in the U.S. (after NYC and San Francisco), and with the city at constant 98+% occupancy rates, landlords can charge pretty much whatever they like and they'll find someone to pay it. The cycle tends to be that a neighbourhood will go to shit and be a war zone for several years, then students will start to move in because it's cheap and usually convenient to uni and public transportation and all that; then property investors - often gay ones, here - will see the white kids arriving and start buying up and renovating the properties, thereby shoving out all the people who have lived there for years and need low-cost housing (who of course tend to be racial minorities and the elderly, because this fucking world); then businesses start popping up to support the new, (relatively) more affluent inhabitants; and then families come in and settle and by this point you're already several steps into the cycle in a new neighbourhood on the other side of the city. Basically it's what's happening in Redfern, but everywhere all the fucking time.

What makes Boston a particularly interesting case study for this is that it's geographically quite a small city, so the lines of gentrification are more clearly drawn here than anywhere else I've ever seen. For example, back when I worked at the health centre in Jamaica Plain, I would walk down Green St to get to work. Like much of Jamaica Plain, Green St is lovely - big, beautiful Victorian houses; lots of trees; cute little playground/park - but then you'd pass the train station and you were in another neighbourhood entirely, where the buildings were dark and heavy and everything looked dirty and dodgy and unwelcoming. Even the people looked different. But you could turn over one shoulder - you wouldn't even have to turn all the way around - and still see where everything was pretty and safe-looking. It was the difference of 10 steps, no more; but once you'd crossed it you were in another part of the city. It was still Jamaica Plain, but it was an entirely different Jamaica Plain. I walked it hundreds if not thousands of times, and it never ceased to amaze me.

Dot Ave is like that too, a series of wildly different neighbourhoods separated by 10-step border towns. But it's exciting, in a way. I don't know this part of the city at all, so I got exactly what I wanted in terms of being in a new place. As much as I love Jamaica Plain, and despite all of the reasons it would be a perfect place for me to live, I had to get away from the part of town I grew up in. I'm trying to delineate between my childhood and my current life in as many ways as possible, and this was an important part of that for me.

*****

To answer a question several of you have asked, a 'boxspring' or 'foundation' is what's called a bed base over there: the big, heavy, solid thing that goes under your mattress unless you have a futon or platform bed or are a uni student. For queen- and king-sized beds you can get them in a single piece or in two pieces; the two-piece kind is known as a split boxspring and is easier to maneuver through tight spaces.

Now, obviously, you would need both halves of the split boxspring for it to work: with only one, you'd have half your mattress hanging off it unsupported. Selling them as individual pieces makes about as much sense as selling left and right shoes separately. Yet this appears to be what Sears does... maybe. It's what they do online, for sure; but having spoken to a couple of clerks in stores, they all seemed to be under the impression that the two halves were sold as a single set for the same price. It's deranged, and a great example of why the company has been plummeting for the last few decades. Problem is, their prices can be awesome (I found the mattress on their website for less than 1/3 the regular price), so you make the deal with the devil. And sometimes it works out, like with my mattress; and sometimes not so much, like with my 0.5 boxspring.

*****

A professor here has changed her e-mail signature for the season to 'Happy Holiday.' Just the one, apparently. That's all you get.


XOXO

Enter the Confessional #3: But I've got a really good personality!

Wow. So I'm doing really well with that 'keeping to a weekly schedule' thing, huh?

It would be easy to blame my extended fail on a long list of recent events, so that's exactly what I'm going to do. Some of them are easy to discuss in a public forum: Thanksgiving, moving house, busy time at work, lead-up to Christmas, etc. etc. etc. Others are more complicated and more personal, and have involved an intense mix of joy and pain (and sunshine and rain, sing it all god's children...) and fear and triggering and triggering and triggering. I'm dating a couple of girls, one of whom is awesome and good to me, and the other of whom I actually like - and you all know me well enough to know what that means. I'm settling into a life here that after only a handful of months is already uncomfortably rife with overlaps and I'm making decisions that aren't always good. I'm broke, of course. And I'm going to rot my teeth out with candy canes if I don't slow my roll.

Returning to the topic of moving, it's been... hard. The physical move itself wasn't too bad, but this was the first time in many years that I've packed up my room in my parents' house and not been taking it all to Sydney. I've been dreaming of home a lot lately and I know it's just my brain trying to sort through things and move on, but it's exhausting and it's starting to wear me down. I never thought I'd be living in an apartment in Boston. It's a great apartment, and I have a great new flattie named Karen, and it's in an area that I don't know so it feels new. All good. But I can't help but think back to this time last year, when my life finally felt like it was coming together again after far too long - job I liked, house I liked, friends I loved, new prospects on the horizon - and then how quickly it all got pulled out from under me, and how much I lost in the process. And that's happened too many times in the last few years, that thing of going, '...finally.' right before having my whole life go tits-up, for me to be able to even begin to believe that good things may be on the horizon. Which is all apart from the fact that I still struggle to see Boston itself as a good thing. It was the right thing, I know that, but it doesn't feel like a good thing. So there's that to contend with.

On a less fraught note, my bed is cursed. I'm not sure what the hell is behind this, but it's one damn thing after another: first, the queen-size mattress and boxspring arrived as scheduled, but the boxspring didn't fit up the stairs. They took it back and advised me to order a split queen, which I did... but no one told me I had to order two of them, because for some reason they sell the halves individually at Sears (Flattie Karen said she was going to go by there and ask for one leg of pants), and none of the three people I discussed my order with saw fit to clarify it with me. And so a week later - this past Saturday - the delivery men arrived with one half of a boxspring. And when I called Sears to give them a piece of my mind, they put me on hold for 20 minutes and then asked me to call back later because their systems were down. No, really.

At this point I decided to just get a cheaper set from the furniture place downstairs, and that arrived yesterday without incident. And having the boxspring meant that the bed was high enough off the ground for me to put my brand-new, custom-designed, hand-painted doona cover on without it dangling onto the floor. So I did, only to discover that the lovely cherry-blossom detail that was meant to have bright red flowers instead had anaemic red-pink ones, which is... not what I wanted. And kind of icky. And has prompted Flattie Karen to start calling me 'Salmon'. So now I'm trying to organize a return on a custom item, which is always a joy. I also still have a stray half-boxspring lying around my room because I'm trying to arrange the return of that to Sears, but they seem unwilling to get in touch with me about it. Oh, and my actual bed frame, which I thought was being delivered at the end of this week, won't be here until sometime next week, or possibly after due to the holidays.

[Sigh.]

I mean, all I can do at this point is laugh, but it's beyond ridiculous. The rest of the move has gone pretty smoothly, and I do have furniture (and credit card debt) thanks to the proud Scandinavian meatball merchants at Ikea, but the fact that the main feature of my room is unlikely to be sorted within the first month of my living here is starting to bug me. I will say that the mattress is amazingly comfortable, though, so I'm lucky there. And half expecting it to spontaneously combust in the night, or possibly be harboring Julian Assange without my knowledge.

In better news, the dancing's going well. It's been a busy few weeks, but now I've got two shows down and only one more to go - but the remaining one is the biggest and scariest one. I'm doing a fusion number with a dagger; it's to a song called 'Dr Sin' by Chasing Shadows (highly recommended), and my character is an assassin. It's a bit martial-artsy and a bit tribal and entirely fueled by my latent rage issues, but it seems to be going over pretty well so far, apart from how I almost took out an audience member a couple of weeks ago when my dagger slipped from my hand and went shooting out into the audience. First time I've ever dropped it, let alone flung it, and of course it happened at a show. Luckily no one was hurt, but the event has already passed into legend and my teacher is never ever going to let me live it down, not that I can blame her for that.

So that's me. For now. I won't do anything so stupid as to promise another post between now and February, but I'll see what I can do.

XOXO